


clothed in the sun

by marketchippie



Category: Under The Pendulum Sun - Jeannette Ng
Genre: Changelings, F/M, Sibling Incest, Theology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 02:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16802068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: In which Cathy and Laon leave the estate to embark on their next chapter, and wonder in which Testament they find themselves.





	clothed in the sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Triss_Hawkeye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triss_Hawkeye/gifts).



**** “You are aglow,” says the Salamander, who never speaks directly.

Cathy’s back is turned, eyes on the contents of her suitcase. In a night’s time, she and Laon will leave this place; for now, it is to her to check and check again that all things are as they should be. Here and there, she finds smudges of ash beneath her fingertips: well, that is an inevitability, the hands that packed them being what they are. “Thank you,” she says now, “Salamander, for everything—”

Then, with greater significance: “You catch the light. You wear it like a garment.”

Before Cathy turns around, she is gone. The candle by her nightstand flickers. Cathy lays her hand on her belly to calm her nerves, pressing slightly until her breath falls even. She has nothing to fear of this place, nor of its denizens.

She holds the candle up before she blows it out, speaks aloud:

_Our work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work._

We work with what we can, she thinks, with what we have. Here in Hell there is no shortage of fire, and, too, no shortage of dark and hidden things.

“Thank you, Salamander,” she says again to the empty room with faith—always with faith—that her words will find the necessary ear. Yes, she will wear the light as she travels, will wear wear her fireproof heart on her sleeve.

They have few goodbyes to make, but those they make, she feels. She makes her excuses to Laon with a light kiss, leaving him at breakfast with a Bible cracked open to the side of his porridge and knowing he has plenty of quandaries to keep him busy. Flower-gathering is her business, not his, and she does, to be quite fair, intend to gather the flowers. Mr. Benjamin presents her with the best blooms, stems cut. The bouquet is surprisingly English: stephanotis, geranium. She inhales and is, for a moment, a child again, in an uncomplicated world. The wind ruffles at the back of her neck, and she remembers where she is going.

She swallows. “Have you any directions?” she asks Mr. Benjamin.

“Into the wind, ma’am,” he replies. “Of the seven hills, save the coldest for last.”

And any words on what we might find?”

“It’s the words that’ll give you most trouble.” He tilts his head: “’They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.’ ‘To speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.’ It’s the Holy Spirit that must fix the language, but we’ve never had trouble speaking to each other. Suppose there is a Spirit that moves us already? Suppose it is the tongues of fire that let us speak to each other? Is the fire a holy thing?”

Haltingly, she replies: “The fire of God is a holy thing.”

“Tongues of fire, you will find all around,” he promises. “Wherever you go.”

She sighs. Hell reveals itself in familiar images, even here.

Later, she asks Laon: “Do you believe God made this place before He abandoned it? It adheres to his imagery.”

“As Bowdler adheres to Shakespeare, perhaps.” He frowns, shaping a wrinkle between his brow. She presses it smooth with her fingertip, then with her lips. With her eyes closed, she can hear him sigh. “It does not bear the master’s stamp. Like as not, it is stolen work.”

“Whose?”

He whispers in her ear: “Hers.”

Even with the geas, with free dispensation by the Queen to travel as they will, she shivers. Yet it is pleasing to shiver in his arms, safely, free to come and go.

Tomorrow, they will walk into a world written in secondhand knowledge, its rules interpreted by a bent ear. But its door is open to them, and that is all any saviour has ever needed: a lock unsecured on the door to a world.

When she sleeps, she dreams of the Queen, in Pivot.

The Queen does not speak, does not so much as turn her face. Smudged in ash on her forehead is an Enochian sigil, smudged on her lips are traces of red fae wine. Her gown is purple and scarlet, decked with gold and precious stones and pearls. The cup in her hand is empty of wine, printed only with her lips, clattering as she holds it with a slightly shaking hand. By this, by all of this, Cathy understands at once that she must be dreaming, for the Queen is never less than perfectly groomed when she chooses to appear to them. In her great golden cup—of course—cogs rattle in the bottom, where the dregs of the wine should be. Outside her window, Cathy sees Arcadia stretch itself like a great beast, many-headed, serpent-backed. Seven hills, and the rivers winding between them.

The Queen closes her eyes.

Cathy wakes with a moth fluttering against her lips. It flies off as she breathes, leaving the taste of dust and ink behind, and the words in her mouth:

_The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.  
And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth._

Laon stirs at her side. “Did something wake you?” he asks, a warm hand sliding up the expanse of her spine, bare beneath her nightshift.

Cathy bites her tongue.

She awakens at sunrise, vomiting sharply into her chamberpot. Nothing comes up. For a moment, she thinks of milk spoiling by changelings, wonders if she might have been wrong all this time, that what she consumes might wait to spoil within her. At once, Laon is at her side, hands smoothing back her hair, then dipping a towel in a bowl of water to mop her Hell-hot brow. “Don’t say such things,” he says. “Nothing spoils within you. No sin we carry is yours to bear. Cathy, we needn’t travel today.”

She lets his words sink into her flesh, which feels raw and swollen to the touch. Pain warps up her back as she chokes on nothing again, bowing her lips to the chamberpot again.

She tries to remember whether she has had her courses since coming to Arcadia.

The lantern tracks its steady metronome across the sky, pulling and stretching at her body like a tide. How many forms has she taken since coming here? Human, changeling, beloved, monster. Sacred in duty, forsworn in flesh. Then again, the flesh was born forsworn—and can she ever believe it now, sore and dry-throated. It might be nothing. But the original sin is not nothing; that, she carries with her at all times. Even here, she has to assume the sin carries, encoded within her flesh molded (for good or evil) on God’s earth.

“Is a child born in Arcadia—”

She has always thought better aloud, and he is a part of her, he of him; she has little desire to keep secrets. His breath is sharp in the air. “Cathy, you aren’t.”

“Of course not,” she snaps, then grabs at his hand, placating immediately. She did not mean to be cruel. She cannot contemplate it. “I thought of, of Benjamin, of the children yet to be brought into our flock. But what are the Queen’s rules, and the land’s? Would it be _of_ Arcadia?” she asks. “Can it be baptized? Can it be saved from entrapment by salt, as we can be?”

“Any child we might have would be beyond saving,” says Laon, hand gloomily limp in hers.

In spirit, she supposes, on God’s earth, yes. And they say children of incest are monstrous, bent. But what does that mean in this land of owl queens and clock courtiers and sea-swallowing whales?

She believes she would love it. Her capacity for love, in Arcadia, has surpassed her expectation.

“Are you well?” he asks, the cloth on her forehead again. His fingers are soft on her temple, solicitous. “Even in Arcadia, the—” He hesitates delicately. “Your humors might unbalance, in bad air. Any woman’s might.”

“Enough of that,” she snaps, this time not taking it back. “If the air hasn’t poisoned you, it’s done no harm to me.”

“We needn’t leave,” says Laon, again, and she kisses him and says firmly: “I will be just as well anywhere else we go. All of Arcadia is our home.”

As the missionary society travels the world believing that the hand of God tends their every hearth and unlocks every door, so too must they believe that their faith paves the world before them. It is their lack of knowledge that sanctifies this Eden, even as they attempt to learn the rules along the way.

Would an ignorant soul, a pure new blank vessel, be trapped here, or would it be most free in the purity of its ignorance? Would it be born with an extra joint, and would they know whether the error was borne of the fae or of their blood? Would the water boil in the baptismal font? Would the Queen come flashing into the temple, demanding the child as her own?

She closes her eyes and envisions following a star, finding a barn, kneeling in the hay. Here in the room, she turns her cheek to her brother’s knee at her back, kisses the cloth. Bracing her hand to the surface, she stands.

“I feel much better,” she says. “Perhaps if we could go to the garden before leaving, I might take a last bite of fruit.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thinking about kids (for any ship, let alone... here) is never really my bailiwick as a writer, but when I sat down to write this I thought: What's the biggest theologically-evocative Molotov cocktail I could throw in their path? I started at Revelations, worked backwards, and couldn't get the questions out of my head. It felt like a choose-your-own-adventure point of narrative divergence: what story comes next, religious or pagan? Tam Lin or Bethlehem?
> 
> This is sort of Christmasfic in a terrible way, isn't it? Happy holidays!


End file.
